Freelancing to Freedom

I’ve often felt that the best way to learn something is to just throw yourself into the fire, so to speak, regardless of whether you know what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter how much you read on the subject or how many times you watch someone else do it – the only way to really learn is to do it yourself.

Working on my first manuscript as a freelancer has proved challenging. My style guides and dictionaries are already dog-eared. Even just now I had to look up “dog-eared” to see if it had a hyphen. Realizing how new I still am at this profession is rather humbling. I couldn’t have asked for a better first project though. I’m learning so much and have already made several mistakes I know not to make again, such as quickly skimming through a manuscript and throwing out an estimate of how much time it will take. A better way to do this, to ensure I’m accurately quoting my time and getting paid what I deserve, would be to actually edit a portion of the manuscript, then multiply that by however many pages, words, etc. there are.

Ah well, it’s all about the experience right now anyway. I have plenty of time to make money 🙂 Bye for now!